The Obligation of the Cross-- Sermon for Second Sunday in Lent B

We human beings love stories about magic. We also like to imagine that there is some way to have power over every single thing in our lives. This extends even to fiction -- even fantasy. In the movie, Bruce Almighty, Bruce was given the power of God for one day -- but couldn't force the woman that he loved to start seeing him again after he broke her heart. Likewise, in the Harry Potter series, it is made clear that nothing can bring back the dead to life -- not even the resurrection stone, an object of supposedly almost unlimited power, and that you can use magic to create infatuation, but real love had to be genuine. In the Disney movie Aladdin, the Genie has three limitations on his power: he could not kill anyone, make anyone fall in love, or bring people back from the dead.

In all these we see an acknowledgement that love cannot be coerced. Jesus’s power, just like God’s also has this limitation.

Jesus, newly proclaimed the Messiah by Peter, then immediately predicts his own suffering and death, which we know happened on the cross, with our 20/20 hindsight. So Jesus swears them to secrecy about the Messiah thing—until he can make it clear that he is NOT going to be the warrior Messiah everyone is expecting. Far from it. He then lowers the boom on his disciples, and tells them he will suffer and die, and then rise again.

This is absolutely a distinctly unwelcome message, and we can’t blame Peter—the disciple most like us—for protesting against this stark potential loss. Just over a week ago, on Ash Wednesday, we had the sign of the cross placed on our foreheads by someone else, and we then wore that sign of shame and mortality into a world that denies the very existence of both shame and mortality.

Another thing we have turned into an article of faith in our society is our lack of obligations to others. This has been especially pronounced in the last few years, especially in American political discourse: the same people who used to tip their hats and say, “Much obliged,” now would sooner chop their right arms off than acknowledge that they have an obligation to anyone but themselves. And yet the more they isolate themselves from their neighbors, the more vulnerable they feel. And rightly so.

The time in which Paul and Jesus lived was a time in which the vast majority of people in the Roman Empire lived in abject, crushing poverty. Scarcity and want were real and pressing concerns. And the thing about living in a scarcity mindset is that it heightens one’s sense of disconnection and competition against one’s neighbor.

Obligations narrow our options. They take us from what we want to do to what he are compelled to do. We don’t want to be tied down. We live in a culture awash in “rugged individualism,” in which any need for someone else is portrayed in the public American ethos as a failure. And ironically, the same people who extol individualism fear the power of the community even while they decry the loss of those “good, old-fashioned American values” that supposedly existed somewhere back in the mists of time, but in actuality have NEVER provided equal benefits for all people.

Jesus tells us bluntly that the core of discipleship is self-denial, and many of us stop right there and check out. We hate self-denial: that might be why when we are called to enter into a period of self-denial, like during Lent, we pick things to deny ourselves that really don’t matter very much. We don’t like to hear the word “losing” either. But losing your life can also be seen as shedding the old way of living that was in harmony with the values of the world. Self-denial offers to take us from the emptiness of thinking only about ourselves to the fulfillment of living a life with purpose—one that is directed toward others. Taking up your cross is taking up that obligation to others.

From our side of history, we know that the cross led also to the resurrection. What if we understood that denying ourselves and taking up our cross is meant to remind us that we are called as Christians into obligation with each other, in the name of God? 

We are called to love each other, be compassionate toward each other, and take care of each other in faithfulness, in good times and bad. What if denying yourself and taking up your cross was understood as giving up something you have a right to, if that would spare someone else pain or suffering? What if denying ourselves and taking up our cross means that instead of using people and loving things, as so much of society tells us to do, we loved people and used things to help us accomplish that?

We are indeed, much obliged to God, and to each other. What if denying yourself actually means being true to what makes us children of God, made in God’s image—that we are called together to live in community, loving our neighbors as ourselves and not trying to draw lines about who are neighbors are, and who are neighbors aren’t. What if it means putting down our solipsism and the fear and anxiety that generates, and instead embrace the beauty of community, held together by love and the hope that gives us the endurance we need for times such as these?

What if we understood what Jesus is saying here as “Take up your love and hope, and follow me in truly loving each other?”

What a radical change that would be, if the public face of Christianity would become about love rather than power. Because right now there are too many people calling themselves Christians who believe that Christianity is all about forcing others to live according to their rules—and Jesus never ever did that. To be clear: your faith has the power to reshape us, and lead us to change our perspective until we see life all around us—which is surely what the kingdom of God is all about.

I’ve heard it said that faith is rooted in the present, and hope looks toward the future. Martin Luther, in a sermon on Galatians 5:5, stated the difference, among other things as being this: “Faith has for her object the truth, teaching us to cleave surely thereto, and looking upon the word and promise of the thing that is promised; hope has for her object the goodness of God, and looks upon the thing which is promised in the word, that is, upon such matters as faith teaches us to hope for.” But both are tied together by “promise,” another idea that also appears several times in the readings we have today, even when it is not explicitly named. Faith is related to trust, while hope is tied to expectation. Faith is the foundation, and hope leads us to the goal of living by God’s values, not by ours. Following Jesus means losing the old way of life—a life that, for most people, doesn’t work very well, anyway.

So here is the kernel of hope buried in our readings today. Abraham has faith rooted in trust, and that faith carries him through in hope that God’s promise to him will be fulfilled in the future, even though he and Sarah are certainly not getting any younger. Peter hears about crosses, and rightfully panics and loses hope. In his panic, he doesn’t hear that the cross is not an end—but a doorway. A doorway to having abundant life right now and always, in changing our orientation from scarcity to abundance.

Taking up our cross calls us to understand that we are not fully human without embracing each other, and without checking ourselves any time we are tempted to seize the opportunity to use others rather than see ourselves as intimately connected with each other, even with those half a world away. Taking up our cross means embracing each other despite our differences, but then gaining a community of faith and hope. To embrace others in their joy and in their pain. This journey to Easter requires us to walk the way of the cross—the way of living for others—first.

May we embrace and take up our cross today, because it also means we embrace resurrection, the new life of Christ, which is the pearl beyond price. May we turn to hope rather than fear. May we choose to walk with the suffering, the outcast, and stand with those the world shames. For then we stand with Jesus.


Amen.

Preached at the 10:30 online worship service at St. Martin'a Episcopal Church, Ellisville on February 28, 2021.


Readings:

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

Psalm 22:22-30

Romans 4:13-25

Mark 8:31-38